When HP acquired EDS in May 2008 it was clear that in the short term the company would have to manage significant integration challenges before the medium and long term benefits of the acquisition would come to bear. Now, 18 months later, HP claims that the acquisition has been completed and so it is time to take a closer look at what has been achieved so far.

Trying to avoid the obvious and the already underway, here are my predictions for 2010.

1. Cloud security standards emerge. By the end of 2010, we’ll see a framework emerge for establishing a well defined set of technology, practices, and processes, organized into different levels of trust. Ultimately, adherence to these specifications will need be certified by third parties. The effort won’t be complete, but it will be underway. Look to the government as key industry (other than the vendors) driving this effort.

COROLLARY: The use of cloud will take off as adopting organizations by and large overcome their security concerns – or at least, understand them at a specific enough level to seek out providers that satisfy these concerns.

2. Federation will start to take off by the end of 2010. Use of federation will be fueled by SaaS and cloud computing and the need for single sign-on to bridge identity from the enterprise to those external environments. Where standards reign over kludges, SAML will be the leading mechanism. OpenID will continue to be just a lab toy for the "Identerati".

3. Managed Security Services expands far beyond “Managed”. Organizations are not only turning to managed security services, they are seeking more from their providers than merely assuming operational functions. Increasingly, they seek partners to help them with security strategy, benchmarking, making the business case, and integration. MSSPs that are in fact multifaceted solution providers will start to establish market dominance. Big winners will be IBM, VZB, Wipro, among others.

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A recent post on BusinessWeek explored an “emerging” concept in Western-style innovation management -- one that has deep roots in India - called Jugaad. The article mentions a meeting led by my former colleague (and still friend) Navi Radjou, and notes that jugaad is “an improvisational style of innovation that’s driven by scarce resources and attention to a customer’s immediate needs.”

Explore the term “jugaad” and you will find a range of enthusiasts and detractors. Many - particularly those more intimately familiar with the terminology -- argue that jugaad is not, by its very definition, a robust innovation solution to complex business problems. Rather, its just another way of saying “get it done whatever it takes” – meaning that innovation is done in an inexpensive manner, “on the fly”. In this context, it seems like a tough way for a multi-billion dollar company to build an innovation practice.

Take a look at Forrester’s recent Enterprise IT Services Survey and you will find a data point that highlights an interesting challenge in the IT services marketplace. When we asked North American and European IT services clients about their biggest challenges with existing IT services and outsourcing relationships, 52% said that “cost savings are lower than expected and 40% said “inconsistent or poor quality service”. No real surprises here: given the large number of companies that partner with service providers in an explicit effort to lower costs, many IT professionals simply underestimate the time and resources it takes to define and manage these relationships.

But look at the #3 and #4 responses, and the data gets more interesting. 33% of respondents said that their biggest challenges were “lack of innovation and or/continuous service-level improvements” and 35% cited “inability of vendor/contract to respond rapidly to changing business needs”. Don’t the first two responses, in some ways, conflict with the latter two?

These data point to a complaint Forrester hears all the time from professionals within the technology industry: they know that their clients want a proactive business partner – one who can help the client drive innovation and business results – but they don’t know how to charge for innovation in a way that clients will be willing to pay for it. Clients say they want greater level of business innovation from their IT service providers, but prioritize cost-reductions – which are more easily measured and which justify the investment in the IT services relationship.

Most fields of study start with classification. The important precursor to any theory, middle-range or grand, is putting what you're studying into conceptual buckets that help organize the topic in meaningful ways. That's where the study of product management and product marketing started, and that's where it has stayed for the last several years. (For more discussion on that point, click here.)

Those conceptual buckets are important, for a variety of very practical reasons. For example, any theory of PM needs to exclude things that are not PM-related. As any of us who have been in the PM profession knows, defining the boundaries of PM has been difficult. The specialized consulting firms, such as Pragmatic Marketing and Sequent, have done a good business helping their clients sort out what their PMs should and shouldn't be doing.

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We all know that end user organizations have security concerns about cloud computing. But let’s put some numbers to that: according to our latest Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009, fully half of organizations (49% of enterprises and 51% of SMBs) cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not adopting cloud computing. This means security is far more than just a concern; it’s a major inhibitor to growth.

Many of you vendors have incorporated cloud computing into your strategy, or are preparing to. In order to gauge how security factors into such plans across the tech industry, we’ve set up a poll on the Vendor Strategy home page within Forrester.com for vendors to take.

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Stephen Liu and Petra Neiger of Cisco explain how their serious game, myPlanNet, illustrates Cisco's 25 years in the networking business. And it's an amazingly successful marketing tool. Plus, a quick pointer to a site that suggests how to get lots and lots of user-generated content. (c) 2009 Tom Grant.

This was the shareholder lawsuit, not the consumer/victim lawsuit, so different issues apply. But it's still interesting. Somewhere down the road, such a case will win…likely because of a smoking gun email by IT security staff. That calls for greater communication and accountability around security, which smells like GRC to me.

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When you're start working in an unexplored field of study, such as PM in the technology industry, it's tempting to propose the Grand Theory Of Everything (GTOE). It's also the worst possible time to develop a GTOE.

Opinion is cheapTwo years ago, when I started this job, I knew I'd have a full research agenda. Very few people took on the job of pundit, arguing for a particular vision of how the PM function should work. Even fewer had any hard data on how it actually does work, in practice. Before making any sweeping statements about the profession, I needed to fill in some big empirical holes.

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Our guest, Marie Kalliney of Ultimate Software, describes their innovative PM team structure that just makes sense. Plus, some quick news about the PM open house and upcoming research. I also ponder a curious omission in some corners of the blogosphere. (c) 2009 Tom Grant